FEBRUARY 9, 1998:
Between March 1965 and May 1966, Bob Dylan released a total of
eight album sides of original music. On tour across America and
England, he fought with audiences who believed he had betrayed
folk music by picking up an electric guitar, playing loud and
howling crazy. Dylan and his back-up band--then called The Hawks,
later renamed The Band--played in a perfect amphetamine swirl,
each night teetering on the brink of a musical apocalypse. Dylan's
cawing vocals gouged into the crowd, and the angry mass lashed
back screaming, "Judas!" and "Cocksucker!"
into the frenetic silences.

The nightmare ended in June when Dylan crashed his motorcycle
and abruptly dropped out of public life. Until the beginning of
1968, he remained silent. No albums, no tours. Rumors circulated
that he was dead, a vegetable, an amnesiac. The truth, as is often
the case, was somewhat different. To recuperate from the accident--and
from those heinous 13 months--Dylan fled to upstate New York with
The Hawks. There, in the basement of a house called Big Pink,
the five men idled away a long summer playing music. Someone eventually
set up a tape recorder to capture these raucous creations. The
result is known as the Basement Tapes.

Although never intended for public release, a few of these 100-plus
tracks were pressed as an acetate disc and sent to other musicians.
Subsequently, other Basement songs were stolen, reproduced and
circulated around the world. Columbia officially released some
of these tracks in 1975, and over the years a handful of others
have appeared on official Dylan compilations. To this day, though,
most of the Basement Tapes are only available as illegal recordings.

The thesis of Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic is that
the Basement Tapes are Dylan's private response to the angry crowds,
to the one-dimensional, political interpretations of traditional
music made by members of the folk movement. In Marcus' view, this
response reveals a lot, not only about Dylan's music but about
American folk music in general, as well as the ignored history
and culture of America's marginalized groups in Appalachia and
the Deep South.

At this point it would be helpful to note that the debate between
Dylan and the movement he had abandoned was essentially a debate
over authenticity. Most folkies believed that Dylan's electric
music was false because his sound was electric and his words were
no longer simple. Dylan meanwhile had adopted a belief that folk
music was anything but simple. In his words, true folk music was
"nothing but mystery." Songs from Blind Lemon Jefferson,
Dock Boggs, Robert Johnson, Frank Hutchison and their ilk crawled
out of an older, weirder America where murder, betrayal, passionate
obsessions and dangerous, impossible secrecies were ubiquitous.
In the eight sides released during those 13 months, in the Basement
Tapes themselves and in the best of Dylan's more recent recordings,
Dylan succeeds in integrating that sense of mystery into his own
music. In doing so, Dylan has become a more genuine successor
to the throne of the old performers than any of the folks who
accused him, with such fury, of selling out.

At the very least, Invisible Republic attempts to give
Dylan's music the serious treatment it deserves. Yet Dylan is
not an easy subject to write about. He is a musician who has made
a career out of embracing chaos and mystery. And Marcus' ambitions
here are high. Maybe too high. No writer has yet been able to
adequately describe Dylan's importance, and Invisible Republic,
while perhaps more interesting than most attempts, ultimately
fails with all the rest. The language is sometimes free-flying,
sometimes literal and usually at the wrong moments; and Marcus
resorts too frequently to pretension at the expense of clarity.
In many instances, his writing is so convoluted it's hard to figure
out exactly what the hell he's talking about. His analyses of
specific Basement Tape songs like "Apple Sucking Tree,"
"Clothesline Saga," "Tears of Rage" and "Lo
and Behold!" are tenuous in that they try to define something
that is precious largely because it can't be defined. As
Dylan showed us last year with his bleak, brilliant CD Time
Out of Mind, the final word is not in on this tiny, shriveled
performer. It may never be. (Henry Holt, cloth, $22.50)